THE capital of Rhode Island, the second city of New England,—an agricultural village in the seventeenth, a commercial port in the eighteenth, and a centre of manufacturing in the nineteenth century,—lies at the head of Narragansett Bay. The mainland of the State westward to Connecticut, according to Shaler, rests on very old rocks of the Laurentian and Lower Cambrian series. The greater part of the bay and the land near Providence is upon rocks belonging to the Coal measures. These rocks, softer than the older ones, have been cut away and afford the inlets of the bay. The surface of the State and the sloping hills of Providence have been profoundly affected by the wearing course of the glaciers.
The original village skirted along the western side of the ridge, by which ran the little Moshassuck and Woons-asquetucket Rivers. Eastward the ridge stretched in a plateau to the larger Seekonk, which cut off the peninsula. On the eastern side of the Seekonk, Roger Williams had settled and planted, when Plymouth Colony significantly advised him to move on. In June, 1636, with five companions, he crossed the Seekonk and landed on the rock, since raised to the grade of Ives and Williams streets. Here, as the tradition runs, Indians greeted him cordially, “What Cheer, Netop! What Cheer!” He had arranged with the Narragansett sachems, Canonicus and Miantinomi, for deeds of the lands about these rivers and the Pawtuxet, with certain undefined rights extending westward and northward.
The canoe kept away from What Cheer or Slate rock, south and westward around Tockwotton and Fox Point, up the Providence River, to land near where St. John’s Church stands. The spring of water attracting the pioneer and kept as public property is in the basement of a house on the northwest corner of North Main Street and Allen’s Lane. North Main was the “Towne Streete,” occupied by
the little band of settlers. Williams’s “home-lot” stretched easterly, including the land of the Dorr Estate, at the corner of Benefit and Bowen Streets. A stone in the rear of the buildings marks the spot where Roger Williams was buried.
In this man was the germ of Providence, the adumbration of the little commonwealth of Rhode Island. Whatever drove him from Massachusetts, however the Puritans enforced their narrow political scheme, the result was a free State founded on new principles of government. In the words of Thomas Durfee:
“Absolute sincerity is the key to his character, as it was always the mainspring of his conduct.... He had the defect of his qualities;—an inordinate confidence in his own judgment. He had also the defects of his race;—the hot Welsh temper, passionate and resentful under provocation, and the moody Welsh fancy.”
The “Plantations of Providence” began in these “home-lots,” reaching eastward from the “Towne Streete.” It was intended to give each settler five acres. Some had, moreover, meadow-lands, and there were common rights, as in all the plantations of New England. Chad Brown, John Throckmorton, and Gregory Dexter were the committee who made
